Cristina Biaggi
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Cristina Biaggi is an internationally recognized authority on goddess-centered art, an acclaimed artist, and a world traveler. She reports that she has gone many places in her life, down dark alleys and up high mountains, and for her, exploration is the act of living on the edge, and learning to see in a new way. She took us to the caves and megaliths of Neolithic Britain and Australia where she has studied how the ancients viewed the female form and its function. Her art is intimately linked to her scholarly research and her political activism. The Medusa figure on the side of her house on Ludlow Lane is a self-portrait; she likes to think of it as Maria Callas hitting a high C in Bellini’s Norma.

A question from the audience revealed another interesting adventure. “How old were you, 18 or 21?” Cristina paused, not understanding. “You remember,” the questioner prodded her, “when you swam the Bosphorus.” “Oh yes,” she said, “I was 21.” Amazed, the audience pressed for more information. She explained that she had told her mother with whom she was traveling that she was just going around the corner. Instead, she slipped away into Turkey and swam the Bosphorus. In keeping with her unadorned style of speaking, she did not elaborate. Nor did she mention what her mother said when she discovered what Cristina had done; still, the anecdote captured the flavor of a life of daring, lived without apology, and on the edge.

Milbry Polk
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The second speaker was Milbry Polk, Executive Director and co-founder of Wings WorldQuest. Milbry believes that the urge to explore differentiates us from other species and she points to the fact that our DNA and our language contain the history of ancient human migrations. For Milbry, exploration is a means of understanding the world. She showed us a photograph of the ice shelf of Antarctica, seen from below. Explorers are risk takers, she says; they espouse the uncommon idea. They are open-minded, courageous, passionate and communicative.

Milbry’s father was an adventurer who crossed Saudi Arabia by camel, recreating the journey of the ancient poets. He was a friend of Tolkien’s at Oxford, and when Milbry was a child, he gave her his signed first editions of The Hobbit. She found the books transformative, her first exploration of an unfamiliar world. Milbry has worked with Margaret Meade, lived with the Bedouins, retraced on camel the routes of Alexander the Great and worked as a journalist stationed in Saudi Arabia. After coming to Palisades to raise her family, she teamed up with Mary Tiegreen to write Women of Discovery, a chronicle of the lives of important women explorers who are virtually unknown to history.

Milbry established Wings WorldQuest to promote extraordinary women explorers and scientific exploration, education, and conservation. Current projects include climate change, the communications of elephants, and microbes found in deep ice that contribute to the Big Melt. She concluded by saying that any one of us can be an explorer in our own world. If we can live an adventurous life, we will find ourselves enriched and our world a better place.

The web address for Wings WorldQuest is www.wingsworldquest.org and more about Cristina Biaggi’s work can be found at her website www.goddessmound.com.

The last event in this season’s series of (Palisades People) will feature work-family researcher Ellen Galinsky discussing the New Normal, to be held May 18 at the Esplanade at Palisades. Reservations are available through the Palisades Free Library.